Ñuflo de Chaves, also: "Ñuflo de Chávez", (1518–1568) was a Spanishconquistador. He is best known for founding the city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra in (what is today) Bolivia.
Ñuflo de Chaves was born and grew up in the small Spanish village of Santa Cruz de la Sierra ("Holy Cross of the Mountains"), some 12 km south of Trujillo in the Extremadura region in Spain.
He joined the military and went to South America as a conquistador.
In 1544 in Asunción (in today's Paraguay) he participated in the revolt against the Spanish governor Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. He helped Domingo Martínez de Irala's appointment as governor, and prepared an expedition to Charcas (currently Sucre). In 1557 he planned an expedition to conquer Jarayes lands, and reached today's Brazilian federal state of Mato Grosso, where he thought that he would find gold mines.
In 1561 he moved to the southern Amazon Basin with a group of settlers, where he founded the town of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, giving it the name of his hometown in Spain. Ñuflo de Chaves settled in his new town with his family, being the first European to introduce goats and sheep to the region. He was killed there in a conflict with the Itatines natives in 1568. A few years later the settlement was moved to a new position 220 km further to the west because of the continuing conflicts with the natives.
Today the Province of Ñuflo de Chávez in the BolivianDepartment of Santa Cruz is named in his honor.

This is an excerpt from the article Nuflo de Chaves from the Wikipedia free encyclopedia. A list of authors is available at Wikipedia.

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There were many other Chaves individuals, likewise from the Extremaduran
homeland of Cortes and Pizarro, who were among the first so-called
Conquistadores in different parts of the New World. The prime example is one Nuflo de Chaves ...

And after all the fleet had anchored at a spot towards Santa Cruz, Nuflo de Chaves took possession of the command and government of the same, not
consenting that the Governor or any other person should meddle in the
administration of ...

Around 1570, Juan López de Velasco, the royal cosmographer, counted 300
families of Spaniards in Asunción (vecinos) and 2–3,000 mestizos.20 The
expedition of Ñuflo de Chaves, who himself hailed from Estremadura, must then
have ...

Whilst Alvar Nunez and Irala, with Nuflo de Chaves and the other captains, had
been conquering and building towns, the Jesuits had been preaching in the
wilderness and gathering together the Indian tribes. Not ten years after the
foundation ...